Visual Capitalist have compiled their best inforgraphics for 2017, and from all of them, the one about all the world’s money and markets caught my attention.
In the infographic, Bitcoin market is estimated at $100 billion. That may seem a lot, but in the grand scheme of things it is actually quite small. For instance the Gold market is estimated at $7.7 trillion, and remember that Gold’s main practical use is to conduct electricity, the rest of the value comes from the human-agreement that gold is valuable. With Bitcoin at least one can argue that Bitcoin value is a mean to secure the transactions stored in the Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Another interesting chart is the global stock martkets valuation, estimated at $73 trillion, being the US market 38% of it. The US market is as big as the UK, Japan, China, and Euro Area markets all combined. This really explain the impact and influence of the US market over all the rest.
(each box represents $100 billion)
Last but not least, there is an interesting figure on the charts. How much money is there in the world and how much of it is physical. One of the main arguments against cryptocurrencies is that they are only numbers in a computer, nothing that can be hold physically, but it turns out that the percentage of physical money in the world is quite small:
Only 8% of the money is physical and I’m sure that this percentage will grow smaller by the day as more and more transactions are done online or using electronic payment methods like credit cards. With this is clear that any technology that comes to disrupt the non-physical part of the market has a huge opportunity in front of it.
XBP Trading 